Wall Street’s Prostitute of the Quarter: Richard Shelby

Senator Richard Shelby (R—Skank) has come up with yet another sleazy method for derailing the Wall Street Reform Act.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act was designed to prevent the banking industry from crashing the global economy again like they did in 2008.  Most Americans don’t want another financial meltdown; Republicans apparently do.

Congressional Republican prostitutes — acting on orders from their Wall Street owners — have repeated tried to sabotage any and all reform of the banking laws (or lack thereof) which led to the 2008 crash.  They tried frantically to prevent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — which was part of the Wall Street Reform Act — from being created.  When that didn’t work, they vowed to filibuster ANY nominee to head this new agency, knowing that the agency couldn’t function fully without somebody in charge.

And now Wall Street’s favorite call girl, Richard Shelby, has introduced legislation to require a cost-benefit analysis of ALL new financial regulations.  If a financial regulation’s costs outweigh its benefits, it can NOT be implemented.

And who exactly would be doing this “analysis?”  According to a Reuters spokesman, “Quantifying costs and benefits objectively is notoriously difficult and the result tends to depend on who is doing the measuring.”

This phony “cost-benefit” analysis has been a favorite Republican gimmick since at least the early 1990s.  For some odd reason, they only worry about costs versus benefits when it’s a law they don’t want.  I don’t recall the War on Drugs ever being submitted to a cost-benefit analysis.  Or the Right’s constant crackdowns on abortion.  Or Dumbya’s invasion of Iraq…